Talk:Jeff the Killer 2015/@comment-5614678-20160627040023
I'm going to review this story in length, but before I do I wanna give full disclosure: I was one of the participants in the contest this story won and my entry didn't make the finalists by a margin I still can't imagine I'm allowed to disclose. Maybe I can, it might not matter anymore. But just to be safe/respectable, I won't. Anyway, you can read my entry (here ) if you want. The reason I feel it's important to disclose this is because I'm going to give this story a bad review, and disclosing this potential COI is important for context. So if you think I have too much of a bias, you don't have to read this review. But these are my honest, genuine thoughts. I wanna start off by saying that there were a ton of great entires in that contest, my personal favorite being JZoidberg's. I think he did a fantastic job taking the source material and putting a new twist on it while keeping true to the spirit of the original. This is story is a remake of the original Jeff the Killer in it's purest form. It takes the original formula and narrative, and improves it 100% on a technical level. The spelling, grammar, structure and everything else that the original completely failed at is vastly improved. It is an extremely competent rewrite of JtK in every way. That's the problem. This is story is, to put it blunty, boring. It's extremely, unrelentingly boring. While it's never painful or embarassing like the original was, it's still totally unentertaining. Again, on a technical level it's vastly improved - almost in a cold, mechanical way. This is actually a little worse, because an incredibly bad story makes you feel some kind of emotion, but a competent story that isn't entertaining makes you feel nothing. This kind of goes back to something I said after I found out I didn't make the finalists (to be honest, I might have been kinda whiny about it because I was honestly pretty salty. I'm better now, though.) I said something along the lines of "spelling and grammar are an editer problem, not a writing problem." Don't misunderstand me, spelling and grammar are extremely important. If you were watching a movie and suddenly the audio cut out or the camera fell to the ground, you'd turn it right off, wouldn't you? But at the same time, they're only the foundation of a good story. The most important part is creating something interesting and engaging. And this story kind of proves that philosphy right. Is it a bad story? Arguably no. The author who wrote it is extremely talented, is great at writing characters and has written far better stories than this one. If you observe the story's objective aspects, they're all good. But the subjective aspects like "is this entertaining?" or "is this scary?" end up falling short by about a mile. A lot of people say that you can't make Jeff the Killer good, but that's not true. If you look at many of the other stories in the contest, a lot of them are really good. They're engaging, entertaining and even scary. But I think the reason this one ultimately won is because people who were fans of the originally wanted the winner to be close to it as possible. Which is a real shame. With all the actually good material poeple have written based on this character, it's shame that he's represented by the most uninteresting possible interpretation of his origin. Overall, it's just not a good story. I liked the way the characters were written, but I didn't care what happened to any of them. I could barely finish this. It's like ambien in written form. Maybe in another ten years we can have another rewrite contest and get something better. Or better yet, we could have a sequel contest for creepypasta that have fallen into the public domain. With the origin stories out of the way, writers would be free to take the characters in new and extremely interesting directions. But I guess there's always Spinpasta for that. 4/10. This story achieves all the minimum standards for quality, but never rises any higher.